Blaming Obama

The biggest obstacle to the
success of the antiwar movement right now is the Obama cult – the fealty of his followers and
well-wishers who want to give him the benefit of every doubt, and yet
wonder why our foreign policy of perpetual war continues, virtually
unchanged. After all, he seemed like he represented “change,” and
he said he represented “change,” sincerity oozing from every
pore, and yet …

And yet a year and some months
into his presidency, the US has escalated its “war on terrorism,”
extending its reach and pouring yet more resources into what is surely
a bottomless pit. George W. Bush, after all, ordered only one “surge”:
as commander-in-chief, Obama has so far ordered two. So why are his ostensibly “antiwar”
supporters cutting him so much slack?

The answer varies with each
individual, but a lot of the reasons have been helpfully summarized
by Stephen Walt in a
recent blog, in
which he gives every excuse in the book and then some to explain why
Obama seems so much like a Bush rerun in the foreign policy realm.

As long as Obama’s been in
office, Obama’s progressive supporters “and even some sensible conservatives”
have been “surprised and dismayed” that his military and diplomatic
posture seems nearly identical to that of his predecessor in the White
House. Was he merely a good actor, or are there hidden factors chaining
him to the “missteps of the Bush White House? Has he cracked, or is
he “trapped”?

Walt believes the latter: “I
don’t really blame Obama,” he writes. The President “can’t simply
wage a magic wand,” after all, reverse course and “get the rest of the government to fall into line.”

Let’s stop right there and
ask: why, exactly, not? It’s true there are various factions within
the administration with goals that might conflict with his own, but
why can’t he do what George W. Bush did and simplyignore their advice?

After all, how many times in
the run up to the invasion of Iraq were we confronted with reports of dissident CIA analysts, who challenged the administration’s
evaluation of the intelligence; how many diplomats,generals and military experts disputed the wisdom of trying to export
democracy to a region that had never known it? How many people marched against the war all
over the world in a vast and vocal expression of impassioned protest?
Yet President Bush – having more power than any Roman emperor ever
dreamed of – ignored their good advice, and launched the invasion
anyway.

Why can’t this President
be as single-minded in his alleged virtue as his predecessor was in
the service of evil?

Well, avers Walt, there are
“powerful structural forces that inhibit any president’s freedom of
action. Or to put it more simply: he’s trapped. Even if Obama wanted
to chart a fundamentally different course (and I’m not at all sure that
he does), he wouldn’t be able to pull it off.”

Leaving aside, for the moment,
Walt’s telling parenthetical remark, let’s look at some of these
“structural forces,” a vague and awkward phrase (“force” implies
energy, yet “structural” connotes matter) of the sort one
nearly always runs up against when an author is being dishonest with
his readers, and himself. What – or who – are these “structural
forces”?

To begin with, Walt lists “America’s
current global position.” We’ve been such a boon to the world, providing
“collective goods” – open trade routes, oil supplies, “regional
stability,” etc. – that the minute the flow of free goodies stops,
there will be consequences:

“The problem Obama faces,
however, is that it would be neither easy nor cost-free to liquidate
these commitments quickly. This is essentially a variation of the familiar ‘hegemon’s
dilemma‘:
having occupied a position of primacy and taken on a vast array of global
responsibilities, trying to disengage from them is like dismounting
from a tiger. Once you begin to disengage, you may invite some short-term
instability that actually makes things look worse.”

He hedges by inserting the
modifier “short term,” but what Walt is saying here, and throughout
the rest of his piece, is that the effort to reduce America’s overseas
footprint is a futile crusade, and perhaps even the wrong thing to do.
While acknowledging that the US should have ceded the “responsibility”
of its hegemonic position after winning the cold war, and ascribing
our present course to laziness, “hubris,” and worse, he nonetheless
sees no way out of the imperial conundrum short of unleashing that dreaded
“instability” on a world otherwise spinning blissfully in perfect
equilibrium.

The idea that the we must prevent
all signs of “instability” – that the very manifestation of any
disruption in the status quo is an affront and a challenge to our national
security – is one of the conceits of empire that will have to be dashed
on the rocks of realism before we can move forward. This is the same
mindset that made George H. W. Bush decry the fall of East Germany
and worry aloud over the “destabilization” the demise of the Soviet
empire would let loose.

Since Walt brings up the issue
of maintaining oil supplies, I would suggest that the tenuousness of
these supplies might cause us to seriously begin developing alternative
energies. Our hegemonic position has retarded our economic and even
technological development, and the sudden – even abrupt – possibility
that oil supplies might be interrupted would give the markets a major
shove in the right direction: that is, in the direction of economic
realism.

I would also dispute Walt’s
tiger analogy. The Soviet Union – armed as it was with nuclear
weapons, and also with a competing ideology that had universal appeal
– was a tiger. The jihadists are more akin to a swarm
of fleas. We can kill them individually, but they just keep multiplying
as long as they enjoy the right conditions. We have, however,
the power to deprive them of those favorable conditions,which are largely
made possible by our own actions, i.e. by our interventionist foreign
policy, which brings them recruits in droves.

If we can maintain an empire
of bases all around the word, and support a vast bureaucratic-military
army to administer and guard it all, then we can use those same resources
to build an impregnable defense for the continental United States: we
can keep out the fleas while keeping out of other countries’ business.
The swarms of jihadists will then dissipate for lack of ideological
sustenance.

Yet this is a long range goal,
Walt would argue, and in the meantime there will be signs of instability
that will be seized on by the GOP, and those fearsome neocons over at
the Weekly Standard, as “cowardly” and evidence of “appeasement.”
Yet Obama was never going to win these people over in any event, on any
issue: they’d call him an appeasing coward, or, at least, someone
with a “Kenyan
anti-colonialist”
outlook no matter what he did. Does the President of the United States
really have to ask Bill Kristol’s permission before he decides to
do the right thing for once?

Okay, but there’s yet another
“structural force” standing in the way of Obama doing what he knows
in his heart is right: “the foreign policy establishment.” Walt’s
indictment of this supposedly formidable Establishment is incisive –
perhaps a bit more so than he intended. Because he inadvertently homes
in on the reason why we should
blame Obama, and blame him personally:

“For the most part, debates
within mainstream foreign policy circles run the gamut from A to B,
from neoconservativism at one end and hawkish liberal interventionism
at the other. As I said a few
years ago, if
neocons are essentially liberals on steroids, then most liberal internationalists
are just kinder, gentler neocons. They agree on the virtues of American
primacy, the need to prevent WMD from spreading (while keeping most
of our own), the desirability of spreading democracy nearly everywhere,
and the value of nearly all of the United States’ current alliances.”

Yet the President is very much
a liberal interventionist, as his policies over these many months has
made all too clear. He is also very much a creature of Washington, where
the bipartisan consensus Walt decries is made and enforced. He’s
a kinder, gentler neocon, who is widening the “war on terrorism”
even as his administration renames it – and never was anything else.
Surely his continuation of the Afghan occupation and the extension of
the war into Pakistan should come as no surprise: he said he’d do as much during the election
campaign and he meant it.

I talk about the “Obama cult” because
it is indeed a cult in the classic sense, i.e. a group of fervent believers
who project their own image of the Leader onto what is, after all, a
pretty ordinary kind of guy – in this case, a pretty ordinary variety
of semi-hawkish liberal interventionist. Whenever the Leader does something
inconsistent with their idealization, they say “Oh, he doesn’t really
mean it,” or “He doesn’t really believe that.” In advanced
cases of cult-induced blindness, one constructs a more complex apologia,
i.e. positing“structural” obstacles to the implementation of
the Leader’s will. Obama is Gulliver tied down by the Lilliputians
within his own party and administration.

I don’t buy it. One consequence
of the triumph of interventionism over the traditional foreign policy
of the Founders has been the bloating of presidential power until Americans
have come to talk about “the
imperial presidency”
as if it were no big deal. Well, then, what’s to stop the occupant
of the White House from using that imperial power to start downsizing
the imperium? The present occupant clearly has no intention of doing
so, but there’s nothing to prevent a future President from pursuing
that goal.

As US troops rampage through
Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan, collecting gory “trophies” and terrorizing the hapless citizens
of those unfortunate countries, it is none other than Obama who personally
bears full moral and political responsibility. As the commander-in-chief
and chief executive of the mighty American empire, it is in his power
to stop the post-9/11 wilding engaged in by the US military worldwide.
He has done no such thing because he believes in what he’s doing.
Along with the leadership of both parties, the major think-tanks, the
national security bureaucracy, and all the other “structural” bogeymen
who are supposed to have “trapped” him, President Obama is content
to ensure the continuity of American foreign policy as it has been practiced
since the days of Harry Truman – with America “leading” the world.

Change can and will come once
the American people realize they’re being led over a cliff – because
there are many “structural” obstacles to the continuation of that
policy, first and foremost the looming bankruptcy of the American empire.

And when we are wrecked on
the shores of national insolvency and social disintegration, will I
blame Obama? I sure as heck will, and rightly so.

NOTES IN THE MARGIN

I’m taking my show on the
road this autumn, to campuses around the country, talking about some
of the ideas expressed in last Wednesday’s column on “Anti-Interventionism:
The Left-wing Tradition.”
My talk is entitled “Why Has the Left Sold Out the Antiwar Movement?”
– which is sure to provoke a controversy, or at least that’s the
hope.

Author: Justin Raimondo

Justin Raimondo is editor-at-large at Antiwar.com, and a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute. He is a contributing editor at The American Conservative, and writes a monthly column for Chronicles. He is the author of Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement [Center for Libertarian Studies, 1993; Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2000], and An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard [Prometheus Books, 2000].
View all posts by Justin Raimondo